Valuing Medical Innovation

Scholars and policymakers across the ideological spectrum agree that the U.S. drug pricing system is deeply flawed. Most reform proposals focus on one symptom: high prices for existing drugs. But high prices aren’t all that ails the U.S. drug pricing system: Current law also provides weak incentives for medical innovation across wide areas, including vaccines, antibiotics, cancer preventives and early-stage cancer treatments, and cardiovascular drugs. Impediments to pharmaceutical innovation not only slow the growth of U.S. life expectancy but also exacerbate racial disparities in health outcomes.High drug prices and slow pharmaceutical progress are two facets of the same problem: a system that fails to reward medical innovation based on social value. Instead, the United States rewards drugmakers through market exclusivity and federal subsidies that tie reimbursement rates to private-sector prices. The status quo yields two distinct but related consequences. First, rewarding firms based on the profits they can extract over a fixed period of exclusivity provides underpowered incentives for preventives and early-stage treatments, as well as for products that generate positive externalities. Second, linking government reimbursement rates to private-sector prices causes firms to raise prices for non-government payors so they can extract larger sums from Medicare and Medicaid. The end result is that the United States pays high prices for drugs of limited efficacy, but those high prices fail to spur the development of more effective drugs in critical areas. To break out of this bind, the federal government should reward social value directly, using cost-effectiveness analysis to set the prices it pays for medical innovations without limiting patient access. Models developed by other countries and by the nonprofit Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) lay the groundwork for value-based pricing, but those models require significant modification to sustain innovation. Of particular concern, ICER and other advanced economies assign a much lower value to human life than U.S. federal agencies typically do. We argue that federal drug pricing should incorporate values for longevity gains that are in line with U.S. cross-agency norms. Value-based pricing will lower some costs and raise others, with the United States continuing to pay more than other countries. But the federal government should not forgo opportunities to improve Americans’ health just because other countries might receive collateral benefits. Rather, strong federal support for medical innovation should be understood as one way that the United States generates valuable global public goods